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June 28, 2017

Starting with the ultimately full and actual

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications. A 2013 study, for example, reported that half of all clinical trials in the US are never published in a journal.

According to critics, the journal system actually holds back scientific progress. In a 2008 essay, Dr Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds and conducts medical research for the US government, argued that, given the importance of scientific innovation to society, “there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated”.

Jim, I agree with you that we scientists must examine mathematical proofs and empirical feasibility, and apply that as a major measure of validity and value of the results. That is exactly what our paper, a condensation of more than 100 of our other publications consists of: Very dense, but creating a consistent theme based on hypothesis testing, where after all these years, the results not only still stand up, but consistently amplify the scope of the previous work. This, with respect, is cogent data that the underlying fundamental axioms for TDVP are correct.

More later.

With my special best wishes.

Vernon

June 28, 2017

Vernon M Neppe MD, PhD,

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1. The Western intellectual tradition has, for the past few centuries, gotten caught up in a program of materialistic reductionism. The goal of this project is to account for all of experience in terms of the assumption that the ultimately real consists of a self-existing, essentially deterministic complex of spacetime and energy which unfolds according to immutable laws that can be adequately expressed in mathematical terms. Insofar as this project is pursued, it leads inevitably to the problem of “emergence.” How can phenomena such as life, mind and consciousness have arisen out of a material matrix in which none of these phenomena are inherent?

2. Sri Aurobindo avoids this problem by starting not with something simple and abstract, but rather by starting with the ultimately full and actual, and then deriving everything else as a simplification from that. This ultimately full and concrete beginning of things he calls, in accordance with the Vedic tradition, Brahman.

3. This move, the move of starting with the full and the actual is one which has become somewhat suspect in the scientific West, and which needs some justification. The question is “where are we going to start our thinking?” In part, this is an aesthetic question. We can always decide that we are content to start in an arbitrary set of premises, as long as those premises lead to an explanation for the way that things are now. This is the procedure that is generally adopted in science. But, in the context of metaphysics, where we are asking deeper questions, when we start with an arbitrary set of premises (for example, low entropy energy singularity (Big Bang), spacetime, and mathematical laws) we can always ask “Where did that come from?” My mind, at least, rests uneasily on such a basis.

4. My mind rests more easily if I begin with the assumption of a complex unity, containing within itself unity and plurality, infinity and finitude, good and evil – indeed all possible qualities – and yet transcending the totality of qualities in a fullness unknowable by mind.

5. One way that I reason to such a totality is by considering the plurality of entities that I find in the universe of my experience. All of these entities, no matter how diverse they are, are in utter solidarity with each other. They are all part of one universe. Even if I imagine that this one universe comes into existence out of a plurality of diverse factors (say, a Good God and an Evil God, as the Manicheans might suggest, or Creativity, Eternal Objects and God, as Alfred North Whitehead suggests), it must still be the case that these primordial factors are interacting with each other – and such an interaction necessitates a larger, more embracing context. Ultimately, then, in this sense, the universe is One, and that One must be such as to contain and uphold all.

6. I cannot claim any compelling rational justification for such a way of constructing a metaphysical understanding. I can, however, at least point to the way in which the ultimate starting point of our thinking as we launch into the metaphysical enterprise is a matter of pre-philosophical choice. Do we want to begin our thinking with some factors which are abstracted out of sense experience? Or do we want to start our thinking with the all embracing Unity in which all existence is playing itself out?